If you've got keen hearing, you'll have detected the sound of tens of thousands of hearts sinking on Monday, when newspapers reported soaring stress hormone levels in toddlers starting nursery. That would have been a repeat of the same sinking sound on the Friday before, when a British Medical Journal editorial warned that women delaying childbirth until their late 30s are defying nature and storing up public health problems for the future.

Now I'm not about to offer up the standard, modern-working-woman counter-arguments - that babies love the stimulation of nursery, that fertility jeremiahs are just trying to get us back to Kinde and Kuche. No, it's the nature of what passes for debate that dejects me. This is pure Groundhog Day, rehearsing the arguments in the same old polarised terms yet again. Surely, in 2005, there's a way past either-orism?

I've been on both sides of this one. When the theory of maternal deprivation met the campaigns of newly fired feminists in the early 1970s, I was firmly in the give-us-a-creche camp. The psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who had claimed that six-month-old babies separated from their mothers were distressed and disturbed, was our bogeyman. What about fathers, I chirruped endlessly (perhaps in recognition of the importance of mine).

When, much later, I had a baby I was forced to reconsider. I didn't need to be told about cortisol levels in nursery toddlers. I couldn't hand my one over to others for protracted periods of time not only because of her potential distress, but also because of mine. I recanted, became a bit of a Bowlbyite even.

And now - my God, change is upsetting - my view has shifted again. Why must we have two sides to the debate? Why not five, or 10, or none? The assumptions behind so many studies and our defensive reaction to them both seem to me unproductive - just as harmful to adults and kids as late childbearing or early nursery might be.

As far as I can gather, the new nursery research suggests practical steps to reduce toddler stress, rather than just rubbishing the entire business of daycare. Yet other studies of social behaviour often seem to take place in a reality-free zone, ignoring why people behave as they do. Partly, of course, it's the Daily Rail way research gets reported. The starting point, frequently, is that parents in paid work, as well as most single men and women, are fundamentally feckless and reckless.

I did meet a Bad Mother once, in a playgroup. When her daughter (who must have been two) brought her a pretend cup of coffee with pretend milk, she snapped "You know I don't have milk in my coffee" and she wasn't pretending. Instead of wondering what had produced such giant wrath I, like most of the other parents there, I suspect, felt profound gratitude. This woman's obviously defective parenting skills made us feel so much better about our own imperfect ones. As the old saw goes, if she hadn't existed, we would have had to invent her. And maybe we did.

In reality most people, most of the time, try to do their best in conditions - as the fellow once said - not of their own making. Far better, therefore, if we're not to provoke endless sterile guilt and denial, to try to change the conditions, while understanding the complexities of making decisions in real life, which is never a choice between perfect options. This applies not only to issues concerning women and babies, but equally to the son agonising over whether to put his aged mother into a home.

Uncomfortable truths do have to be acknowledged - but so too does the fact that risk is almost always relative. I used to discuss this with a dear sun-loving friend. She knew about melanoma but reasoned that the sun made her feel good which also, supposedly, provided some protection against cancer. My friend died young of a different illness, and I was so pleased she'd had as much sun as she'd wanted.

So yes, nursery can overwhelm small children, but living with a depressed mother or one constantly worried about money - if those are the only alternatives - might be worse. History and geography can be our friends here, too. Having babies in one's 40s isn't a new phenomenon, only having first babies. And what we think of as decent parenting is a western, post-Freudian idea - there are lots of other ways of doing it.

If we could carve out some public space to debate these vexed issues without demonising ourselves and others, or projecting fantasies of perfection that can never be realised, then my word, the sun would shine.